Comment Re:Theo's an asshole and OpenBSD defcon4 (Score 1) 234
Not to rain on your parade, as Sun has been a daily source of irritation
for me for the last 18 years, but a lot of your facts are a bit skewed.
There's plenty of good reasons to hate Sun/Solaris and you missed every one.
Each of your listed beefs aren't anywhere near what matters.
Datacenters (Sun shops) have been using veritas's vxfs in place of UFS
because until recently ufs lacked journaling. UFS is a perfectly fine and
fast filesystem, though of course not as advanced as AdvFS which HP
incompetantly killed after buying Compaq for it (by trying to integrate it
into HP-UX *after* firing all of their experts).
Sun Solaris is a true SVr4, you can tell because of how it handles the
runlevel scripts. The BSDish behaviour is only found if you are compiling
executables originally developed on a bsd/bsd-like box that need to link
against the compatibility libraries (which became usable in Solaris 2.4)
Since Solaris 2.5.1 the compatibility libraries have been stable and even
somewhat elegant. I'm not so happy with Solaris 9 as sun's growing
dependance on the OS software is leading to non-consistant behavior, though
Solaris 10 is addressing some of those issues.
Sun also has an edge in scalability, in our current DC we have a few
E20k & E25k's running relatively peacefully in active production. It's
hard to argue with a box with over 200GB of memory. (though I do have
a serious beef with Sun about how it handles that specific feature)
There are no Opterons or intel/intel-like systems existing anywhere
in the world that can approach the raw throughput of a box with
72 processors. Network based clustering is not an acceptable solution to
very many real-world problems. But bringing up SMP in this thread isn't
even close to fair as openbsd's SMP is in its infancy.
In terms of security, Sun does in fact have a "trusted" package which
renders the box very secure (at the cost of being very non-unixlike)
Though I would definitely agree that OpenBSD is far more secure out of
the box.
But I'd have no second thoughts on putting a blueprint secured Solaris
box naked on the internet.
In any event, I'm sure nobody cares about my rant so cheers.
-Grumpy Old Admin
for me for the last 18 years, but a lot of your facts are a bit skewed.
There's plenty of good reasons to hate Sun/Solaris and you missed every one.
Each of your listed beefs aren't anywhere near what matters.
Datacenters (Sun shops) have been using veritas's vxfs in place of UFS
because until recently ufs lacked journaling. UFS is a perfectly fine and
fast filesystem, though of course not as advanced as AdvFS which HP
incompetantly killed after buying Compaq for it (by trying to integrate it
into HP-UX *after* firing all of their experts).
Sun Solaris is a true SVr4, you can tell because of how it handles the
runlevel scripts. The BSDish behaviour is only found if you are compiling
executables originally developed on a bsd/bsd-like box that need to link
against the compatibility libraries (which became usable in Solaris 2.4)
Since Solaris 2.5.1 the compatibility libraries have been stable and even
somewhat elegant. I'm not so happy with Solaris 9 as sun's growing
dependance on the OS software is leading to non-consistant behavior, though
Solaris 10 is addressing some of those issues.
Sun also has an edge in scalability, in our current DC we have a few
E20k & E25k's running relatively peacefully in active production. It's
hard to argue with a box with over 200GB of memory. (though I do have
a serious beef with Sun about how it handles that specific feature)
There are no Opterons or intel/intel-like systems existing anywhere
in the world that can approach the raw throughput of a box with
72 processors. Network based clustering is not an acceptable solution to
very many real-world problems. But bringing up SMP in this thread isn't
even close to fair as openbsd's SMP is in its infancy.
In terms of security, Sun does in fact have a "trusted" package which
renders the box very secure (at the cost of being very non-unixlike)
Though I would definitely agree that OpenBSD is far more secure out of
the box.
But I'd have no second thoughts on putting a blueprint secured Solaris
box naked on the internet.
In any event, I'm sure nobody cares about my rant so cheers.
-Grumpy Old Admin
